Retreat No Surrender Quotes

I’ve lost a lot of battles, but I’ve never lost sight of the war. My goal is to fight my way to a day when we’re old and gray and she looks at me and says ‘I’m glad you never gave up.’ Until then, I fight. No retreat, baby. No surrender.

It is generally the trustful and optimistic people who can afford to retreat. The loveless and faithless ones are compelled by their pessimism to attack.

During the dark night there is no choice but to surrender control, give in to unknowing, and stop and listen to whatever signals of wisdom might come along. It’s a time of enforced retreat and perhaps unwilling withdrawal. The dark night is more than a learning experience; it’s a profound initiation into a realm that nothing in the culture, so preoccupied with external concerns and material success, prepares you for.

Be bold in life. Seize the moment. There is no surrender, no retreat. There is only conquer or be conquered, victory or defeat. Anything less is to be forgotten to history.

There are moments in life when a man retreats defensively, when he must give ground, when he must surrender less important positions in order to protect the more important ones. But should it come to the very last, the most important one, at this point a man must halt and stand firm if he doesn't want to begin life all over again with idle hands and a feeling of being shipwrecked.

Possession is not only when the devil plays hide and seek in your brain or poison your medula oblongata with negativity, but it is also when you are under the influence of the same specie as you!

Surrendering is intentionally laying down the power I possess. And have I considered that the power I lay down is often more powerful than that which I’m laying it down in front of? Therefore, I would be wise to recognize that surrender is less the absence of power and more the presence of fear.

Apathy is giving up when we need to get up.

To fall is not to fail. To fail is to never fall because I never got up in the first place.

What you don't do is surrender. You might retreat occasionally, but you don't give up.

Sadly, in too many cases surrender is having been ‘outrun’ by fear rather than having ‘run out’ of heart.

Glory?! Have you gone MAD? There's no glory to be had now! Only retreat -- or surrender -- or death!" "That's an easy chose for us, arcadian! SPARTANS NEVER RETREAT! SPARTANS NEVER SURRENDER!

Apathy is unconditional surrender where we are driven into hiding by unrealistic fear, and firmly held there by the misinformed belief that we are helpless to do anything other than hide. Therefore, apathy survives solely on lies and can be completely abated by truth.

Until you get the measure of your own soul, Jim, don't be quick to condemn a priest, or anyone else for that matter. I'm not scolding you, sweetheart," she said hurriedly. "It's just that, until you've been there, you can't know what it's like to hold yourself to promises you made in good faith a long time ago. Do you hang in there, or cut your losses? Soldier on, or admit defeat and try to make the best of things?" She'd looked a little sheepish then and admitted, "You know, I used to be a real hardass about stuff like this. No retreat, no surrender! But now? Jimmy, I honestly don't know if the world would be better or worse if we all held ourselves to the vows of our youth.

The spiritual freedom we seek cannot be found by grasping at, retreating to, or protecting our perceived safe spaces. Our freedom lies in remaining open continuously, not only to Life’s changes but also to the Divine Light within us and others. This is our choice. Although often perceived as a weakness, being open and surrendering to the experience of the present moment is our greatest strength. By authentically living Life in the Now, we submit to Divine guidance where we find the freedom to see everything equally and sacred in Truth.

we are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.

Come here,” she said. An order, soft. He would have crawled across the floor to her, if she’d commanded it. He would have dragged himself, the way he’d torn through fire and through ice. The way he’d thrown himself at her feet, halfway dead and ice thawing in his lungs. He surrendered a step into the room. In spite of her initial boldness, she drew back from his approach. Something primitive shot through him at the sight of her retreat.

For this is the journey that men make: to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn't matter much what else they find. Money, position, fame, many loves, revenge are all of little consequence, and when the tickets are collected at the end of the ride they are tossed into the bin marked FAILURE. But if a man happens to find himself—if he knows what he can be depended upon to do, the limits of his courage, the positions from which he will no longer retreat, the degree to which he can surrender his inner life to some woman, the secret reservoirs of his determination, the extent of his dedication, the depth of his feeling for beauty, his honest and unpostured goals—then he has found a mansion which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life.

I was still a newlywed and certainly wasn't to the point where I felt comfortable yelling, "I'm going to shit my pants any second!" But the sweating had started, which was followed by the tears. "I'm not feeling well, and need to get home," I told him. "Ok, but I have to obey the speed limit because of all the kids in the neighborhood," he replied. I was pleading with him to hurry up when he came to a complete stop. I screamed at him, "Why are we stopping?" He rolled down the window. "Retreat." I could see the flag lowering in the distance, the beautiful orange sun setting behind it. In the opposite direction I could see the roof line of our home - so close, yet so far away. As Retreat played, I surrendered. I pooped my pants. I took one for the flag. Now that's patriotism.

I'm a warrior. I don't retreat or surrender.

Too often surrender is an option that exists only because we created it. And if that‘s so, is it really an option?

Life is riotously oblivious to the concept of ‘giving up’. Rather, it’s only the forlorn muse of our frightened intellect that causes us to ‘pack it up’ when life is ‘picking it up’.

... we are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.

The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion otherwise the garrison are to be put to the sword if the fort is taken. I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, and our flag still waves proudly from the walls. I shall never surrender nor retreat.

You’re an English major, aren't you?” “Hey!” Immediately retreating, Keith swatted at him with a dishcloth. “Leave my brain alone. It’s resting.” “Sorry, sorry.” He leaned away, hands up to display his surrender. “I didn't mean it, I take it back.” “You’d better

Kenji goes suddenly still. At the creak of the door Kenji’s eyebrows shoot up; a soft click and his eyes widen; a muted rustle of movement and suddenly the barrel of a gun is pressed against the back of his head. Kenji stares at me, his lips making no sound as he mouths the word psychopath over and over again. The psychopath in question winks at me from where he’s standing, smiling like he couldn’t possibly be holding a gun to the head of our mutual friend. I manage to suppress a laugh. “Go on,” Warner says, still smiling. “Please tell me exactly how she’s failed you as a leader.” “Hey—“ Kenji’s arms fly up in mock surrender. “I never said she failed at anything, okay? And you are clearly over-react—“ Warner knocks Kenji on the side of the head with the weapon. “Idiot.” Kenji spins around. Yanks the gun out of Warner’s hand. “What the hell is wrong with you, man? I thought we were cool.” “We were,” Warner says icily. “Until you touched my hair.” “You asked me to give you a haircut—“ “I said nothing of the sort! I asked you to trim the edges!” “And that’s what I did.” “This,” Warner says, spinning around so I might inspect the damage, “is not trimming the edges, you incompetent moron—“ I gasp. The back of Warner’s head is a jagged mess of uneven hair; entire chunks have been buzzed off. Kenji cringes as he looks over his handiwork. Clears his throat. “Well,” he says, shoving his hand in his pockets. “I mean—whatever, man, beauty is subjective—“ Warner aims another gun at him. “Hey!” Kenji shouts. “I am not here for this abusive relationship, okay?” He points to Warner. “I did not sign up for this shit!” Warner glares at him and Kenji retreats, backing out of the room before Warner has another chance to react; and then, just as I let out a sign of relief, Kenji pops his head back into the doorway and says “I think the cut looks cute, actually” and Warner slams the door in his face.

As we so often find in ancient folklore, the Cailleach offers us a cyclical metaphor for life, one in which the energies of spring arrive again and again, nurtured by the deep retreat of winter. We are no longer accustomed to thinking in this way. Instead we are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the whole slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.

But in recent weeks, my happy hibernation has been disrupted. I’ve come to call it the “terrible threes”: the dark insomniac hours when my mind declares itself, fully fired, in the middle of the night. It always happens at three a.m.: a long way past late, but too early to surrender and start the day. There, in the truest night, I lie in the dark and catastrophise.

Order No. 227, more commonly known as ‘Not One Step Backwards’. Stalin made many changes, then signed it. The order was to be read to all troops in the Red Army. ‘Panic-mongers and cowards must be destroyed on the spot. The retreat mentality must be decisively eliminated. Army commanders who have allowed the voluntary abandonment of positions must be removed and sent for immediate trial by military tribunal.’ Anyone who surrendered was ‘a traitor to the Motherland’. Each army had to organize ‘three to five well-armed detachments (up to 200 men each)’ to form a second line to shoot down any soldier who tried to run away. Zhukov implemented this order on the Western Front within ten days, using tanks manned by specially selected officers. They followed the first wave of an attack, ready ‘to combat cowardice’, by opening fire on any soldiers who wavered. Three

We won! We won!" Daisy jumped up and down and threw her arms around Liam, nearly knocking him over as she pressed her lips to his in a delighted kiss. Her lips were soft and warm and sweet with chocolate. The shock of them short-circuited his brain and for a moment he couldn't breathe. And then he was pressing her lips apart, hungry for her, desperate for more. She softened against him, sighed. He braced himself for her to retreat, but instead, she tightened her arms around him and kissed him back, her tongue tangling with his as she explored his mouth. "Pizza!" She pulled away, leaving him floundering, his brain struggling to understand why someone was shoving a box in his face when all he wanted was her sweet lips and her soft body and her sigh of surrender. "Pizza selfie." Daisy held up her phone and took a picture of them with the pizza box angled in the corner. She laughed when she showed him the screen. This time he was the one who looked dazed.

Lightness. Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can. Do this the instant you realize what you are resisting; the instant you see which quarter the winds of evidence are blowing against you. Be faithless to your cause and betray it to a stronger enemy. If you regard evidence as a constraint and seek to free yourself, you sell yourself into the chains of your whims. For you cannot make a true map of a city by sitting in your bedroom with your eyes shut and drawing lines upon paper according to impulse. You must walk through the city and draw lines on paper that correspond with what you see. If seeing the city unclearly, you think you can shift line just a little to the right, just a little to the left, according to caprice this is just the same mistake.

...Now let's set the record straight. There's no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there's only one guaranteed way you can have peace—and you can have it in the next second—surrender. Admittedly, there's a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face—that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand—the ultimatum. And what then—when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we're retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he's heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he'd rather "live on his knees than die on his feet." And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin—just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it's a simple answer after all. You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." "There is a point beyond which they must not advance." And this—this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through strength." Winston Churchill said, "The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we're spirits—not animals." And he said, "There's something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty." You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We'll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness...

If our democracy worked as it should, we would elect wise women and men who made laws for the good of the people and enforced those laws. That, though, is not the way things work. Greedy, power–mad billionaires spend money so that politicians such as George W. Bush can buy elections. Corrupt corporations such as Enron defraud old ladies and commit crimes. And they get away with it. They get away with it because most of us are so afraid of losing the security of our nice, normal lives that we are not willing to risk anything about those lives. We are either afraid to fight or we don’t know how. Or we believe that bad things won’t happen to us. And so, in the end, too many people lose their lives anyway. In Nazi Germany, millions of men who acquiesced to Hitler’s murderous rise to power wound up marching into Russia’s icy wasteland—into the Soviet Army’s machine guns and cannon—to themselves be murdered. In America after 9–11, trusting teenagers who had joined the National Guard found themselves sent to Iraq on extended and additional tours. Our enemy killed many of them because we, citizens of the richest country in the world, did not provide them with body armor. Grieving mothers protested the wasting of their sons’ lives. Nadia McCaffrey defied Bush’s shameful ban on the filming of U.S. soldiers’ coffins returning home from Iraq. She knew, as we all did, that this tyrannical dictum of Bush dishonored our soldiers’ sacrifice. And so she invited the press to the Sacramento International Airport to photograph her son’s flag–draped coffin. Again, I am not comparing George W. Bush to Adolph Hitler, nor America to Germany’s Third Reich. What I do believe is that each of us has the duty to keep the Bushes of the world from becoming anything like Hitler—and to keep America from invading other countries with no just cause. We will never, though, be able to stop corrupt politicians and corporations from doing criminal things until we stop surrendering our power to them. The more we fear to oppose them—the more we want to retreat into the supposed safety of our nice gated communities or downtown lofts—the more powerful people will conspire to ruin our prosperity and wreck our lives.

Preparations for war, which the most false of all proverbs recommends as a way of ensuring peace, in fact create the belief in each of the adversaries that the other wants to break off relations, a belief which brings about that very breakdown, and then, once it has taken place, the further belief on each side that it was the other side who wanted it. Even if the threat was not sincere, its success encourages its repetition. But the exact limits of successful bluffing are difficult to determine; if one party goes too far, the other, which up to that point had been retreating, begins to advance; the first, unable to change its methods, accustomed now to the idea that the best way to avoid a breakdown is to seem not to fear it (as I had done this evening with Albertine), and, in its pride, preferring defeat to surrender, continues its threats up to the point where neither party can any longer retreat.

Many of the principles Dale Carnegie writes about in How to Win Friends and Influence People apply directly to communication. Keep the following points in mind: • To get the best of an argument—avoid it. • Show respect for the other person’s opinion. Never tell a person he or she is wrong. • If you are wrong, admit it quickly, emphatically. • Begin in a friendly way. Get the other person saying “yes” immediately. • Let the other person do a great deal of the talking. • Let the other person feel the idea is his or hers. • Speak softly. • Smile appropriately. • If a confrontation can’t be avoided, don’t feel you have to get an unconditional surrender. Always give the other person an opening for an honorable retreat. RESOLVING CONFLICT This intelligent approach to resolving conflicts is not as easy as it may sound. Sometimes you may not feel calm, rational, or open-minded. The psychologist William James wrote, “Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling.” In other words, when you adopt the actions of a calm, rational person, you become calm and rational. When you act open-minded, your mind actually opens up. And almost magically, the person with whom you are interacting mirrors those behaviors and adopts the same feelings.

Jude ought to be cowed. She was supposed to bow and scrape, to submit and acknowledge his superiority. A little grovelling wouldn't have gone amiss. He would have very much liked it if she begged. 'Give up,' Cardan said, fully expecting that she would. 'Never,' Jude wore an unnerving little smile in the corners of her mouth, as though even she couldn't believe what she was saying. The most infuriating part was that she didn't have to mean it. She was mortal. She could lie. So why wouldn't she? In this, there was no winning for her. And yet, after he told her all the soft, menacing things he could think of, after he left her clambering back up onto the riverbank, he realised he was the one who had retreated. He was the one who backed down. And all through that night and for many nights after, he couldn't rid his thoughts of her. Not the hatred in her eyes. That he understood. That he didn't mind. It warmed him. But the contempt made her feel as though she saw beneath all his sharp and polished edges. It reminded him of how his father and all the Court had seen him, before he learned how to shield himself with villainy. And doomed as she was, he envied her whatever conviction made her stand there and defy him. She ought to be nothing. She ought to be insignificant. She ought not to matter. He had to make her not matter. But every night, Jude haunted him. The coils of her hair. The calluses on her fingers. An absent bite of her lip. It was too much, the way he thought about her. He knew it was too much, but he couldn't stop. It disgusted him that he couldn't stop. He had to make her see that he was her better. To beg his pardon. And grovel. He had to find a way to make her admire him. To kneel before him and plead for his royal mercy. To surrender. To yield.

In everything I quickly saw the opposite, the contradiction, and between the real and the unreal the irony, the paradox. I was my own worst enemy. There was nothing I wished to do which I could just as well not do. Even as a child, when I lacked for nothing, I wanted to die: I wanted to surrender because I saw no sense in struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had not asked for. Everybody around me was a failure, or if not a failure, ridiculous. Especially the successful ones. The successful ones bored me to tears. I was sympathetic to a fault, but it was not sympathy that made me so. It was a purely negative quality, a weakness which blossomed at the mere sight of human misery. I never helped any one expecting that it would do any good; I helped because I was helpless to do otherwise. To want to change the condition of affairs seemed futile to me; nothing would be altered, I was convinced, except by a change of heart, and who could change the hearts of men? Now and then a friend was converted; it was something to make me puke. I had no more need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often said to myself, I would meet Him calmly and spit in His face. From the very beginning I must have trained myself not to want anything too badly. From the very beginning I was independent, in a false way. I had need of nobody because I wanted to be free, free to do and to give only as my whims dictated. The moment anything was expected or demanded of me I balked. That was the form my independence took. I was corrupt, in other words, corrupt from the start. It's as though my mother fed me a poison, and though I was weaned young the poison never left my system. Even when she weaned me it seemed that I was completely indifferent, most children rebel, or make a pretense of rebelling, but I didn't give a damn, I was a philosopher when still in swaddling clothes. I was against life, on principle. What principle? The principle of futility. Everybody around me was struggling. I myself never made an effort. If I appeared to be making an effort it was only to please someone else; at bottom I didn't give a rap. And if you can tell me why this should have been so I will deny it, because I was born with a cussed streak in me and nothing can eliminate it. I heard later, when I had grown up, that they had a hell of a time bringing me out of the womb. I can understand that perfectly. Why budge? Why come out of a nice warm place, a cosy retreat in which everything is offered you gratis?

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 20, 1965 My fellow countrymen, on this occasion, the oath I have taken before you and before God is not mine alone, but ours together. We are one nation and one people. Our fate as a nation and our future as a people rest not upon one citizen, but upon all citizens. This is the majesty and the meaning of this moment. For every generation, there is a destiny. For some, history decides. For this generation, the choice must be our own. Even now, a rocket moves toward Mars. It reminds us that the world will not be the same for our children, or even for ourselves m a short span of years. The next man to stand here will look out on a scene different from our own, because ours is a time of change-- rapid and fantastic change bearing the secrets of nature, multiplying the nations, placing in uncertain hands new weapons for mastery and destruction, shaking old values, and uprooting old ways. Our destiny in the midst of change will rest on the unchanged character of our people, and on their faith. THE AMERICAN COVENANT They came here--the exile and the stranger, brave but frightened-- to find a place where a man could be his own man. They made a covenant with this land. Conceived in justice, written in liberty, bound in union, it was meant one day to inspire the hopes of all mankind; and it binds us still. If we keep its terms, we shall flourish. JUSTICE AND CHANGE First, justice was the promise that all who made the journey would share in the fruits of the land. In a land of great wealth, families must not live in hopeless poverty. In a land rich in harvest, children just must not go hungry. In a land of healing miracles, neighbors must not suffer and die unattended. In a great land of learning and scholars, young people must be taught to read and write. For the more than 30 years that I have served this Nation, I have believed that this injustice to our people, this waste of our resources, was our real enemy. For 30 years or more, with the resources I have had, I have vigilantly fought against it. I have learned, and I know, that it will not surrender easily. But change has given us new weapons. Before this generation of Americans is finished, this enemy will not only retreat--it will be conquered. Justice requires us to remember that when any citizen denies his fellow, saying, "His color is not mine," or "His beliefs are strange and different," in that moment he betrays America, though his forebears created this Nation. LIBERTY AND CHANGE Liberty was the second article of our covenant. It was self- government. It was our Bill of Rights. But it was more. America would be a place where each man could be proud to be himself: stretching his talents, rejoicing in his work, important in the life of his neighbors and his nation. This has become more difficult in a world where change and growth seem to tower beyond the control and even the judgment of men. We must work to provide the knowledge and the surroundings which can enlarge the possibilities of every citizen. The American covenant called on us to help show the way for the liberation of man. And that is today our goal. Thus, if as a nation there is much outside our control, as a people no stranger is outside our hope.

Under these circumstances the most anodyne book was a source of danger from the simple fact that love was alluded to, and woman depicted as an attractive creature; and this was enough to account for all—for the inherent ignorance of Catholics, since it was proclaimed as the preventive cure for temptations—for the instinctive horror of art, since to these craven souls every written and studied work was in its nature a vehicle of sin and an incitement to fall. Would it not really be far more sensible and judicious to open the windows, to air the rooms, to treat these souls as manly beings, to teach them not to be so much afraid of their own flesh, to inculcate the firmness and courage needed for resistance? For really it is rather like a dog which barks at your heels and snaps at your legs if you are afraid of him, but who beats a retreat if you turn on him boldly and drive him off. The fact remains that these schemes of education have resulted, on the one hand, in the triumph of the flesh in the greater number of men who have been thus brought up and then thrown into a worldly life, and on the other, in a wide diffusion of folly and fear, an abandonment of the possessions of the intellect and the capitulation of the Catholic army surrendering without a blow to the inroads of profane literature, which takes possession of territory that it has not even had the trouble of conquering. This really was madness! The Church had created art, had cherished it for centuries; and now by the effeteness of her sons she was cast into a corner. All the great movements of our day, one after the other—romanticism, naturalism—had been effected independently of her, or even against her will. If a book were not restricted to the simplest tales, or pleasing fiction ending in virtue rewarded and vice punished, that was enough; the propriety of beadledom was at once ready to bray. As soon as the most modern form of art, the most malleable and the broadest—the Novel—touched on scenes of real life, depicted passion, became a psychological study, an effort of analysis, the army of bigots fell back all along the line. The Catholic force, which might have been thought better prepared than any others to contest the ground which theology had long since explored, retired in good order, satisfied to cover its retreat by firing from a safe distance, with its old-fashioned match-lock blunderbusses, on works it had neither inspired nor written. The Church party, centuries behind the time, and having made no attempt to follow the evolution of style in the course of ages, now turned to the rustic who can scarcely read; it did not understand more than half of the words used by modern writers, and had become, it must be said, a camp of the illiterate. Incapable of distinguishing the good from the bad, it included in one condemnation the filth of pornography and real works of art; in short, it ended by emitting such folly and talking such preposterous nonsense, that it fell into utter discredit and ceased to count at all. And it would have been so easy for it to work on a little way, to try to keep up with the times, and to understand, to convince itself whether in any given work the author was writing up the Flesh, glorifying it, praising it, and nothing more, or whether, on the contrary, he depicted it merely to buffet it—hating it. And, again, it would have done well to convince itself that there is a chaste as well as a prurient nude, and that it should not cry shame on every picture in which the nude is shown. Above all, it ought to have recognized that vices may well be depicted and studied with a view to exciting disgust of them and showing their horrors.

Driving Dixie Down In May 1863, two years into the American Civil War, Major-General Ulysses S. Grant captured Jackson, the Mississippi state capital, and forced the Confederate army under Lieutenant-General John C. Pemberton to retreat westward to Vicksburg on the banks of the Mississippi River. Surrounded, with Union gunboats bombarding their positions from behind, Pemberton’s army repulsed two Union assaults but they were finally starved into submission by a grinding siege. On 4 July, Independence Day, Pemberton surrendered. From now on, the Mississippi was firmly in the hands of the North. The South was literally split in two.

Self love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self neglect.

Quigley’s quest for simplicity in history did not preclude his recognition of its complexity. Instead of surrendering to historical complexity as an insurmountable obstacle and retreating to an historicism that would obviate the development of paradigms, Quigley confronted complexity head-on and sought to recognize it as an integral part of historical method. He realized that while reductionism is possible with the physical sciences, any such attempt at dissecting an historical phenomena and isolating and analyzing only one factor as an independent variable is impossible in the social sciences. Thus, Quigley studied the whole context of a phenomena, a method developed by the theoretical biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy termed “general systems theory” 10 This “generalism” became known as “holisticism” and operationalized as “macrohistory.” By “holisticism”, Quigley meant that the “whole” of reality held greater meaning than the sum of its parts, thus scholars should tend towards general studies to understand general and comparative historical concepts and paradigms rather than the hyperspecialization pervading the discipline of history.11

One time we couldn’t even get out the front door, there was so much being thrown, so everybody retreated, including the person who was going to drive the van. I remember the driver crying; it had never happened to him before. The lady who was with him just kept saying, “Oh, this is normal, this is normal.” And he kept saying, “These poor girls, these poor girls.

she is double body-cradled and sung to and rocked, all three women fuck the night into dawn, trading powers and alliances, surrendering or annihilating without attention to origin or plan. There is blood from more than one body. Mouths attack and retreat. Bruises rise like bomb blasts. Hands and fingers disappear into tunnels and caves. There

One does not find freedom or enact responsibility by surrendering to another’s conceptualization of these ideas.

Fighting is found everywhere in the animal kingdom and nowhere so much as among human animals. Animals fight to get what they want--food, sex, territory, control, etc.--because there are other animals who want the same thing or who want to stop them from getting it. The same is true of human animals, except that we have developed more sophisticated techniques for getting our way. Being "rational animals," we have institutionalized our fighting in a number of ways, one of them being war. Even though we have over the ages institutionalized physical conflict and have employed many of our finest minds to develop more effective means of carrying it out, its basic structure remains essentially unchanged. In fights between brute animals, scientists have observed the practices of issuing challenges for the sake of intimidation, of establishing and defending territory, attacking, defending, counterattacking, retreating, and surrendering. Human fighting involves the same practices. Part of being a rational animal, however, involves getting what you want without subjecting yourself to the dangers of actual physical conflict. As a result, we humans have evolved the social institution of verbal argument. We have arguments all the time in order to try to get what we want, and sometimes these "degenerate" into physical violence.

It is the aversion to fear that kills the greatest of dreams. And until the aversion to the death of our dreams outpaces the fears that kill them, what we could achieve will only be a dream.

Sleep is not a dead space, but a doorway to a different kind of consciousness—one that is reflective and restorative, full of tangential thought and unexpected insights. In winter, we are invited into a particular mode of sleep: not a regimented eight hours, but a slow, ambulatory process in which waking thoughts merge with dreams, and space is made in the blackest hours to repair the fragmented narratives of our days. Yet we are pushing away this innate skill we have for digesting the difficult parts of life. My own midnight terrors vanish when I turn insomnia into a watch: a claimed sacred space in which I have nothing to do but contemplate. Here, I am offered a place in between, like finding a hidden door, the stuff of dreams. Even dormice know how to do it: they wake a while and tend to business before surrendering back to sleep. Over and again, we find that winter offers us liminal spaces to inhabit. Yet still we refuse them. The work of the cold season is to learn to welcome them.

In this scenario, ten years from now, if the tech giants are not restrained and their power as data-monopolies becomes further entrenched, governments will find themselves increasingly sidelined and impotent. Reduced to mere gatekeepers, politicians and civil servants will likely retreat behind algorithmic government, with laws shaped by data and machine learning, with all its inherent biases and imperfections, and public services gradually surrendered to private businesses. Indeed, we should expect just about every area of human existence, currently managed by government, to be dominated by Big Tech and its outriders: from the future of finance (just about everyone), to healthcare (Google), and from low-cost housing (Apple, Google) to education (Google, again) and autonomous vehicles (Tesla, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, etc.).

It's like Max's dad has pressed the Pause button on the remote control. The argument is paused. But it is not over. Max is the only boy I have ever seen who makes toy soldiers retreat or surrender. Every other boy makes them die instead.

Montreal November 1704 Temperature 34 degrees “Girl! English, eh? What is your name? Indians stole you, eh? I’ll send news to your people.” His excellent speech meant that he did a lot of trading with the English. It meant, Mercy prayed, that he liked the English. She found her tongue. “Will you take me to France, sir? Or anywhere at all? Wherever you are going--I can pay.” He raised his eyebrows. “You do not belong to an Indian?” She flushed and knew her red cheeks gave their own answer, but rather than speaking, she held out the cross. The sun was bright and the gemstones even brighter. The man sucked in his breath. He leaned very close to her to examine the cross. “Yes,” he said. “It is worth much.” He straightened up slowly, his eyes traveling from her waist to her breast to her throat to her hair. The other sailors also straightened, and they too left their work, drawn by the glittering cross. “So you want to sail with me, girl?” He stroked her cheek. His nails were yellow and thick like shingles, and filthy underneath. He twined her hair into a hank, circling it tighter and tighter, as if to scalp. “You are the jewel,” he said. “Come. I get a comb and fix this hair.” The other sailors slouched over. They pressed against her and she could not retreat. He continued to hold her by the hair, as if she were a rabbit to be skinned. She could see neither river nor sky, only the fierce grins of sailors leaning down. “Eh bien,” said the Frenchman, returning to his own tongue. “This little girl begs to sail with us,” he told his men. “What do you say, boys?” He began laughing. “Where should she sleep? What am I bid?” She did not have enough French to get every word, but it was the same in any language. The sailors laughed raucously. Indians had strong taboos about women. Men would not be with their women if they were going hunting or having important meetings, and certainly not when going off to war. She had never heard of an Indian man forcing himself on a woman. But these were not Indians. She let the cross fall on its chain and pushed the Frenchman away, but he caught both her wrists easily in his free hand and stretched her out by the wrists as well as by the hair. Tannhahorens pricked the white man’s hand with the tip of his scalping knife. White men loading barrels stood still. White sailors on deck ceased to move. White passersby froze where they walked. The bearded Frenchman drew back, holding his hands up in surrender. A little blood ran down his arm. “Of course,” he said, nodding. “She’s yours. I see.” The sailors edged away. Behind them now, Mercy could see two pirogues of Indians drifting by the floating dock. They looked like Sauk from the west. They were standing up in the deep wells of their sturdy boats, shifting their weapons to catch the sun. Tannhahorens did not look at Mercy. The tip of his knife advanced and the Frenchman backed away from it. He was a very strong man, possibly stronger than Tannhahorens. But behind Tannhahorens were twenty heavily armed braves. The Frenchman kept backing and Tannhahorens kept pressing. No sailor dared move a muscle, not outnumbered as they were. The Sauk let out a hideous wailing war cry. Mercy shuddered with the memory of other war cries. Even more terrified, all the French took another step back--and three of them fell into the St. Lawrence River. The Sauk burst into wild laughter. The voyageurs hooted and booed. The sailors threw ropes to their floundering comrades, because only Indians knew how to swim.

O’Neill and his army marched south from Ulster to meet the enemy while his ally Red Hugh O’Donnell marched in from the west. But once the Irish armies were in place, O’Neill and O’Donnell began arguing as to which of them should begin the attack. This delay proved fatal as the agreed upon hour of rendezvous with the Spaniards passed, and the window of opportunity for an Irish victory slammed shut. The Battle of Kinsale lasted three months, and in the end O’Neill was unable to defeat Mountjoy’s siege lines. Finally the Spanish troops surrendered to the English and sailed home. Thousands of Irish rebels died in the fighting or, taken prisoner, were hung. Hugh O’Neill was forced to submit to the English conquerors in a series of humiliating ceremonies, first on his knees to Mountjoy, then to the Lord Deputy and the Irish Privy Council. It was only after he’d put his submission in writing, renouncing his title of “The O’Neill and his allegiance to Spain, as well as protesting loyalty to the Crown, was he told that Elizabeth had died six days before. Mountjoy had tricked him. It was said that O’Neill wept openly and copiously for both his personal defeat and the ruination of the “Irish cause.” The rebel leader retreated to Ulster, and by the good graces of the new king of England, was pardoned once again, and his lands restored to him. He took up residency in his luxurious home, but spurred by a series of dangerous events and the realization that no hope was left for a free Ireland, O’Neill and a handful of Irish overlords and their families sailed from their homeland in 1607. The tragic “Flight of the Earls” ended the most tumultuous century in Ireland’s history. Tyrone,

one of the hallmarks of every successful mission—perhaps of life itself—was a determination to never retreat, never surrender.

Oh, little girl,” a sinister voice rang out in the hall behind me, and every hair on my body rose. “Have you finally come out to play with the rest of us?” A low growl built up in my captor’s chest, and my body started shaking uncontrollably. “I won’t bite . . . hard.” My captor pressed his body closer to mine, and after slowly moving his hand away from my mouth, moved close to whisper in my ear. I cringed back but couldn’t go far. “Don’t say anything.” “Where’d you go, you little bitch?” the voice said again, but this time the sinister tone was laced with hatred. When my captor pulled back, his face was murderous. Tears sprang to my eyes, but I somehow knew that I needed to listen to him. Suddenly his head turned to the side, and I froze . . . not wanting to see the man that voice belonged to. “Damn, bro, already claiming her?” “Leave,” my captor growled. “Now.” “No need to get touchy. I’ll wait for my go at her.” “I said get. The fuck. Out.” “I’m going . . . I’m going. You better keep an eye on your bitch. Because next time she’s alone, Marco might be the one to find her . . . and you know how bad Marco wants her.” “No one touches her.” His body was vibrating, and I looked up at his face to see the barely concealed rage. “For now,” the voice said in a mocking tone. “Possessive doesn’t suit you. You might want to be careful with that, you know how we all like a challenge.” With a deep laugh, I heard footsteps retreating from us. “I’ll be seeing you soon, sweetheart.” A few seconds passed before my captor looked back at me. His face was dark when he whispered, “Do not run from me again, understood?” Not waiting for me to respond, he pushed off me, grabbed my arm, and started walking out of the kitchen. I shrank into him when he suddenly stopped, and we came face-to-face with three men. “Look what we have here,” one of them said. “Told you I’d be seeing you soon, sweetheart,” another said, and I would have recognized that disturbing voice anywhere. “We need her.” The third spoke directly to my captor, his eyes never once looking at me. The man holding my arm pulled me behind him. A move the first two didn’t miss. “You’ve gotten by fine without her, Marco. I’m sure you’ll figure something out.” Moving me to his other side, and closer to the wall, he began walking again. Not four steps later, pain spread over my scalp, and a cry burst from my chest as I was yanked back by my hair. My captor’s arm moved around my waist as he put himself between Marco and me, and his other arm was straight in front of him with a gun pointed at Marco’s head. “Someone’s moody.” Marco never flinched. But a smile slowly crossed his face as he let my hair fall from his fingers. “You have beautiful hair. What a shame.” “No. One. Touches her,” my captor said low, his words full of warning. “Just fuck her and get that pent-up anger out of your system already,” he said to my captor, his smile never fading. Marco stepped back to the other two guys, his hands raising up in mock-surrender. “Until next time.” My

we had the whole history of the Corps behind us, and what a Marine has he holds; he kills or gets killed; he does not surrender; he does not retreat.

It always happens at three a.m.: a long way past late, but too early to surrender and start the day. There, in the truest night, I lie in the dark and catastrophise.

My own midnight terrors vanish when I turn insomnia into a watch: a claimed sacred space in which I have nothing to do but contemplate. Here, I am offered a place in between, like finding a hidden door, the stuff of dreams. Even dormice know how to do it: they wake a while and tend to business before surrendering back to sleep. Over and again, we find that winter offers us liminal spaces to inhabit. Yet still we refuse them. The work of

I do not wish to be understood as asserting religious or even moral justification of suicide, but the high estimate placed upon honor was ample excuse with many for taking one’s own life. How many acquiesced in the sentiment expressed by Garth, When honor’s lost, ’tis a relief to die; Death’s but a sure retreat from infamy, and have smilingly surrendered their souls to oblivion! Death when honor was involved, was accepted in Bushido as a key to the solution of many complex problems, so that to an ambitious samurai a natural departure from life seemed a rather tame affair and a consummation not devoutly to be wished for.

The only reason that we’ve settled is that there’s something greater that we’ve let slip away.

Bushido meant stoicism, self-discipline, and dignity in one’s personal bearing; it emphasized mastery of the martial arts through long training and practice; it lauded sacrifice in service to duty, without the slightest fear of death; it demanded asceticism and simplicity in daily life, without regard to comforts, appetites, or luxuries. The samurai was “to live as if already dead,” an outlook consonant with Buddhism; he was to regard death with fatalistic indifference, rather than cling to a life that was essentially illusory. Shame or dishonor might require suicide as atonement—and when a samurai killed himself, he did so by carving out his own viscera with a short steel blade. But traditional bushido had not imposed an obligation to abhor retreat or surrender even when a battle had turned hopeless, and the old-time samurai who had done his duty in a losing cause could lay down his arms with honor intact.

To ‘give up’ on the idea of ‘giving up’ is the first step in ‘getting up.

The only thing that we should give up on is the idea that we should be giving up.

In At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, the historian A. Roger Ekirch asserts that before the Industrial Revolution, it was normal to divide the night into two periods of sleep: the “first sleep”, or “dead sleep”, lasting from the evening until the early hours of the morning; and the “second” or “morning” sleep, which took the slumber safely to daybreak. In between, there was an hour or more of wakefulness known as the “watch”, in which “Families rose to urinate, smoke tobacco, and even visit close neighbors. Many others made love, prayed, and ... reflected on their dreams, a significant source of solace and self-awareness.” In the intimacy of the darkness, families and lovers could hold deep, rich, wandering conversations that had no place in the busy daytime. This was a function of the times in which the night really was dark, when the poor would go to sleep early to save the price of candles, and even the rich would have the choice of struggling on with their occupation in limited light or surrendering to sleep. Outside the house, the streets were usually unlit, so the only navigable space was home. This was so ordinary, and perhaps also so private moment in the day, that little was written about it. Ekirch picks up a range of passing references to the first and second sleeps in diaries, letters, and literature, but this ancient practice is nearly invisible to the contemporary eye.

I’m not going to discuss this matter any further. You should go train, Emma. I have made my decision. Michael is the chosen one,” Dionysus cemented. Emma sighed in disappointment and walked out of The Dojo, slamming the door shut behind her—just to make sure Dionysus knew she was mad. Instead of going to the builder training grounds, she instead went to the woods so she could calm down. Just one mistake, that’s all it took, and she was kicked out of the “chosen one club”. It was in a battle just days ago where Emma and Jack’s old warrior was killed. Thinking his death was her fault, Emma gave up. She surrendered and called a retreat, proving to Dionysus that she was not the chosen one. The one with unbreakable willpower. Walking in the woods, Emma felt a sudden chill as the birds stopped chirping and the winds stopped blowing. Everything got quiet, there were no sounds except for the rhythmic beating of her heart. She turned around as she heard footsteps behind her. “Disappointed in Dionysus?” a voice beckoned out from a nearby tree making her heart race

There are moments in life when a man retreats defensively, when he must give ground, when he must surrender less important positions in order to protect the more important ones. It seemed to me that this single, most important position was my love.

Surrender” might be the most powerful word in the world, but now I’m caught between the life I know and the one I don’t. Can I just take a walk on Killiney Hill with my best friend, who happens to be my wife, and sit on that wooden seat that overlooks the bay and not check the phone to see what’s going on somewhere else in the world? Can I take in the view without having to be in it? Can I not take that call, in favor of this other call, to stillness? Is this what vision over visibility looks like now? I bow to no one in my love and respect for Leonard Cohen, but I can’t see myself following him up that mountain on his Zen retreat. I’m not sure I’m made to climb that hill. But then the drip, drip, drip. I hear the words of another Sufi, the poet Rumi. Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Maybe I’m discovering surrender doesn’t always have to follow defeat and may be all the fuller after victory. When you’ve won the argument you now understand you never needed to have. The argument with your life

I decided on a retreat. If we dug in and made a stand where we were, we did not have the remotest chance of winning. I figured that the only chance left was to go up into the mountains and carry on a guerrilla campaign. The intelligence squad and the coastal attack squads did not agree. They said they would hold out to the end where they were. I tried to tell them that with no more armaments than they had, they would be sitting ducks for the enemy, but they would not listen.

In dust, heat, and discouragement and fatigue beyond telling, the British retreat continued. Trailing through St. Quentin, the tired remnants of two battalions gave up, piled up their arms in the railroad station, sat down in the Place de la Gare, and refused to go farther. They told Major Bridges whose cavalry had orders to hold off the Germans until St. Quentin was clear of troops, that their commanding officers had given the mayor a written promise to surrender in order to save the town further bombardment. Not caring to confront the battalion colonels whom he knew and who were senior to him, Bridges wished desperately for a band to rouse the two hundred or three hundred dispirited men lying about in the square. “Why not? There was a toy shop handy which provided my trumpeter and myself with a tin whistle and a drum and we marched round and round the fountain where the men were lying like the dead playing the British Grenadiers and Tipperary and beating the drum like mad.” The men sat up, began to laugh, then cheer, then one by one stood up, fell in and “eventually we moved off slowly into the night to the music of our improvised band, now reinforced with a couple of mouth organs.

...it was only natural that this mutual connection between sea and observer be forged: they were kindred spirits. The same, however, could not be done with the implacable moon: that imperious stalwart, which agitated the currents and spurned its beholder. This aloof satellite was formidable, yet neurotic, and so in spite of its ferocity, its movements were simple to predict, thereby granting this fearsome creature a veil of placidity. Its magnitude of torque was easily outmatched by that forceful heave of fear portending any misalignment with its anticipated schedule of phases. It cycled through these on time and without hesitation, experiencing, all the while, a wide array of emotions in response to the dissatisfied countenance of the Master it served. And yet, these changes in mood remained prosaic and careful, dutiful to its Patron; thusly, betraying nothing of its own resentments or intentionality either to its dismissed observer or to its demanding Patron, divulging nothing even of the influence which it potentially wielded over the Patron Planet, but which, in its lunar insecurity, never reached full expression save for the idle touslings of liquid fur. Perhaps it was diffident or bashful—otherwise, it was simple and had little prevailing ambition. Its motives were immaterial, in fact, for its aspirations were easily eclipsed and often countermanded and so one could not help but anticipate in its withered mien a certain resignation, a retreat to introspection away from the gazes of those who mistook its surrender to deterministic forces as a duty held most solemn. To be sure, it was a specter oft-romanticized by dullard poets and priests who admired it for its calming reserve, its gentle wisdom in juxtaposition with the histrionic impatience of the sea: like a tired guardian and a screaming toddler with primacy afforded counterintuitively to the guardian. What mattered more, in fact, was the subject of its influence: the willful and disobedient medium which spurned that hands that molded it. The moldings were more like jostles really and for a time they felt just and reasonable, but soon they came to confine and until verily there was no movement available that was not otherwise preordained by the will of the master. The accursed moon!

What people don’t realize,” he said, “is that in the flight—the only thing that any white person knows or cares about us—Joseph was a bit player. He just took charge at the end because the other chiefs were gone. He didn’t even want to go. But you look at the history books, it’s all ‘Joseph’s journey,’ ‘Joseph’s retreat.’ Many of our people even see him as a coward and a traitor for surrendering. But without him no one pays any attention to us.

Dr. Campbell handed us off to the orthopedic surgeon, who went over the next steps to deal with Brandon’s broken bones. Another surgeon told us about the repairs to the laceration to his liver. Then a plastic surgeon talked to us about the skin grafts he would need to cover the extensive road rash on his left arm. By the time the doctors were done with us, Sloan was wiped. I put her back in her chair and called Josh. The phone was still ringing when I heard it behind me. I spun and there he was. The second I saw him, my emotional disconnect from the situation clicked off. My coping mechanism snapped away from me like a rubber band shot across a room, and the weight of what happened hit me. Sloan’s grief, Brandon’s condition—Josh’s trauma. I dove into his arms, instantly withered. I’d never trusted anyone else to be the one in control, and my manic mind gave it to him immediately and without reservation and retreated back into itself. He clutched me, and I held him tighter than I’d ever held anyone in my life. I wasn’t sure if I was comforting him, or if I was letting him comfort me. All I knew was something subconscious in me told me I didn’t have to hold the world up anymore now that he was here. “I’m so glad you’re here,” I whispered, breathing him in as my body turned back on from being in suspended animation. The sound to the movie around me turned all the way up. My heart began to pound, I gasped into his neck, and tears instantly flooded my eyes. He put his forehead to mine. He looked like shit. He’d looked bad this morning at the station—I knew he hadn’t slept. But now his eyes were red like he’d been crying. “Any updates?” His voice was raspy. I couldn’t even comprehend how hard it must have been for him to see what he saw and stay at work, going on calls. I wanted to cover him like a blanket. I wanted to cover them both, Josh and Sloan, and shield them from this. I put a hand to his cheek, and he turned into it and closed his eyes. “He just got out of surgery,” I said. Then I told him everything, my hands on his chest like they anchored me. He stood with his arms around my waist, nodding and looking at me like he was worried I was the one who wasn’t okay. It didn’t escape me that we were holding each other and I didn’t care what it meant or what wrong signals it might send to him at the moment. I just knew that I needed to touch him. I needed this momentary surrender. For both of us.

people seemed to seek her out at times of pain and despair. It was hard for her to understand why this was. As a young person and later as a doctor, she had been there for them, had comforted and stood with them. They had thought her heart was whole, had trusted in it. She touched the pinecone in her lap. “I have hidden this all of my life, Rachel,” she said, speaking to me from across the room. We all sat in silence for a few minutes: there was nothing anyone could say. Our retreat center has a labyrinth exactly the dimensions of the one in the cathedral at Chartres in France. The Chartres labyrinth is a walking meditation that has roots in the fourteenth century, a path enclosed in a circle inscribed on the floor. The path inside the circle is long and convoluted and eventually leads into the center; it is more than a third of a mile into the center of the circle and out again. The following afternoon, during the period of meditation, Glory decided to walk this path alone. At the beginning, she had clasped her hands behind her back and started walking slowly and deliberately, looking down, trying to keep her balance on the narrow path. She had been walking step by step by step for about ten minutes or so and was becoming a little bored when she began to experience an urge to hold her hands out, palms up. She fought this impulse for a while, telling herself it was irrational. Finally, she had surrendered to it, and walked on with her hands held out before her. Within a minute or two she had the distinct impression that her pinecone was resting on her upturned palms. She knew she had left it on the bed in her room, but with her eyes on the floor she could feel the weight of it quite clearly in her hands. She felt as if she was being told to offer it to others, just as it was. It was a strange and puzzling thought, but it somehow seemed the right thing to do. She walked on in this way for several more minutes and at last came to a place in the labyrinth close to the circumference of the circle where the path unexpectedly turns sharply to the right. As you turn, you discover that you have reached the end of the path and a few more steps will take you to the center of the circle. Turning to the right, Glory suddenly felt the

John, every crucial competition is a battle that determines fate. “Retreat means surrender! Retreat will turn you into a slave!” The war is inevitable, let it come! In this world, competition will not stop for a moment, and we will have no time to rest. All we can do is bring a steel-like determination to face all kinds of challenges and competitions, and we must be in high spirits and happy, otherwise, it will not produce good results. To win the competition, it is more important that you stay alert. When you constantly see your opponent wanting to weaken you, that is the beginning of the competition. At this point in time you need to know what you have, that kindness and tenderness may hurt you, but then you need to use all the resources to win the battle.

Another day, another bender. No retreat, no surrender,” she cheersed, raising her glass.

Their corner She withdrew her hand from his soft but firm grip, And that was all about their romantic trip, She went her way and he went his way, And they got busy chasing the mammons of the day, The hands that held on to each other had slipped away, To feed the obsequious vanities of every new day, But at that discreet corner where she freed her hand, There she does often for a moments few stand, To hold the same sensation and to grab the same feeling, Under which her heart had discovered a new healing, And as her bus arrives, she occupies her seat, And keeps looking at the fading away corner in that narrow street, Where at dusk two shadows often meet, Holding each others hands as they wish and greet, The memory of the hands that held on to each other, Under the sun, under the moon, under the rain, in every weather, The man stands there moments after the woman has left, And his mind turns contemplative in ways simple yet deft, He too catches the bus and goes away, Leaving behind the shadows that you will find there every night and every day, Today the woman did not visit the corner, Today the man too did not surrender, His wishes and his desires, To this corner where he often her memories admires, And where she experiences his sensations crawling all over her, This corner where she felt him and he felt her, Where could they be wondered the street? And the corner, sadly in its obscurity clad dimension did retreat, The following day, they walked together holding their hands again, The street overflowed with joy and the corner had nothing left to disdain, They caught the bus together and looked at the corner and the narrow street, Where they now often meet, And the corner resonates with their whispering smiles, Because now in their minds they cover journeys of endless miles!

As you go on your vision retreat annually and surrender your marriage to God, you are taking a huge step to unify your marriage under His authority and with His provision. Unity comes because we aren’t two stubborn people trying to impose our wills upon each other. We are two submitted people trying to find God’s one will for our purpose together.

The world is turning upside down. Shanghai is a living hell. The Japanese soldiers are patrolling everywhere. People are hiding behind doors, and the foreigners in Shanghai are collected for slaughter.” “I don’t believe you.” “Your lover is probably dead by now. Or sent to a camp.” “What camp?” He was chewing an apple; I could hear the crunch. He went on to say that Japanese carriers, Mitsubishi Zero fighters, bombers, and destroyers had descended on Pearl Harbor and attacked the United States of America on the same day they attacked the Settlement. The Americans finally declared war against Japan. But the Japanese had launched a full assault. They invaded Hong Kong, their naval and air force killing thousands on the island. They flew over South Asia and sunk two British battleships, one named the Prince of Wales and the other Repulse. They captured Malaya, bombed Manila, and attacked the Dutch East Indies. The British had surrendered Hong Kong and retreated to Singapore, and the Americans had given up Manila and fled to the Bataan Peninsula. “They are helpless. They can barely cover their own asses.

Our contemporary Western celebrations forget the dead altogether, or at least remove them from any association with grief and loss. They offer no comfort to those who mourn. We are, after all, a society that has done all it can to erase death, to pursue youth to the bitter end, and to sideline the elderly and infirm. For most of us, the old tradition of laying out our own dead is long forgotten, and the idea that we might be intimate with death is now some kind of a gothic joke. Today's Halloween simply reflects what we secretly think—that death is a surrender to decay that makes us monsters.

The very permanence of the label - of having a brain that just happened to work in a certain way- was my salvation. I had to adapt. I had to surrender. The only thing breaking me was pretending to be like everyone else.

I’m soon interrupting to tell her my own story about being diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and finally realising that I couldn’t power my way out of it or find a therapy to fix me. The very permanence of the label—of having a brain that just happened to work in a certain way—was my salvation. I had to adapt. I had to surrender. The only thing breaking me was pretending to be like everyone else.

Instead we are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth.

But it was there, too, that I came to a kind of acceptance: of my own limitations and of the future that lay before me. I learned that I was not invincible at this moment in my life, but also that it wouldn't last forever. I learned to rest and to surrender.

Among domesticated primates, emotions also confer status and power. That is, the most emotional person in the room “dominates” everyone else in the room: they must all react to his or her emotions, one way or another, or surrender the turf by retreating from the room entirely.

You’re a pirate?” Obviously. Still, hard to believe. He pressed forward, forcing on her a series of blows meant to test her strength and will. She parried and blocked his every move with an aptitude that amazed. “Aye. A pirate, and captain of the Sea Sprite,” she boasted, a wry smile upon her full lips. Indeed, she appeared very much a pirate in her men’s garb—a threadbare, brown suit with overly long sleeves she’d had to roll up. Her ebony hair had been pulled back in a queue and was half hidden beneath a rumpled tricorn. Also, like her men, was her look of desperation and the grim cast to her countenance that bespoke of a hard existence. “We offered you quarter,” she said as she evaded his thrust with ease. “Why didn’t you surrender? You had to know we outnumbered you.” He didn’t answer. In all honesty, he’d thought they could defeat the pirates, if not with cannon fire, then with skill. After hearing of all the pirate attacks of late, they’d hired on additional hands, men who could fight. If it hadn’t been for the damn illness… “It’s not too late. You can save what’s left of your crew. Surrender now, Captain Glanville, and we’ll see that your men are ransomed back.” A wicked gleam brightened her eyes as if victory would soon be hers. He should do as she asked. It would be the sensible thing, but pride kept him from saying the words. Not yet. He still had another opponent to defeat, and so far she hadn’t been an easy one to overcome. Despite his steady attack, she kept her muscles relaxed, her balance sure. Her attention followed his movements no matter how small, adjusting her stance, looking for weaknesses. “How do you know I’m Captain Glanville?” When work was at hand, he didn’t dress any differently than his men. “I know much about you.” Stepping clear of two men battling to their left, she blocked his sword with her own and lunged with her dagger. He jumped from the blade, avoiding injury by the barest inch. This one relied on speed and accuracy rather than power. Smart woman. “What do you want from us?” he asked, launching an attack of his own, this time with so much force and speed, she had no choice but to retreat until her back came up against the railing. “We only just left London four days ago. Our cargo is mainly iron and ale.” Her gaze sharpened even as her expression became strained. His assault was wearing her down. “I want the Ruby Cross.” How the hell did she know he had the cross? And did she believe he’d simply hand it over? Hand over a priceless antiquity of the Knights Templar? Absurd. He swung his sword all the harder. The clang of steel rang through the air. Her reactions slowed, and her arms trembled. He made a final cut, putting all his strength behind the blow, and knocked her sword from her hand. Triumph surged through his veins. She attempted to slash out with her dagger. He grabbed her arm before her blade could reach him and hauled her close, their faces nose to nose. “You’ll never take the cross from me,” he vowed as he towered over her, his grip strong. The point of a sword touched his back. Thomas tensed, he swore beneath his breath, self-disgust heavy in his chest. The distraction of this one woman had sealed his fate. Bloody hell.

Freedom and responsibility themselves are at stake. One does not find freedom or enact responsibility by surrendering to another’s conceptualization of these ideas. Living out the rules of conscience laid down by someone else for the attainment of an unquestioned goal, a freedom designed and articulated by someone else, is the surrender of human imagination and intuition. In the more extreme versions of this, we end up with a collective momentum resulting in events such as Nazi extermination of millions of Jews, the Inquisition, or similar events recently in Africa and elsewhere. That comes from allocating one’s conscience to someone else, not attending to one’s own deeper intuitive sense of right and wrong.

Such stories of objective necessity involve people trying to ‘create a tragic fate with which to cooperate’ (Basterra, 2004: 36). These are typically narratives that explain why an authenticity seeker cannot make a final break from what makes them unhappy. Narratives of objective necessity are paradoxically crafted by the subject but cruelly place any sense of agency beyond their control. For instance, a potential corporate rebel might explain how they would like to leave the company and pursue a career as a guitarist if they did not have to pay the mortgage and have a penchant for expensive lunches. Similarly, a bored consultant might tell us they would love to spend a year in a Buddhist retreat finding themselves if only this would not damage their career trajectory. In each case, we notice that some desired break with an inauthentic identity is thwarted through an appeal to some external, uncontrollable force. The crux here is that an act of agency actually allows the authenticity seeker to surrender their agency.

Good God, woman! Can you not take a compliment?" "Perhaps not," she replied, but he detected a note of indecision. That was all he needed. He leaned closer. "You should learn how to take one, my dear, because I could shower you with them if you would only say the word. And I truly wish you would." Evelyn swallowed apprehensively, for no one had ever wished to shower her with compliments before, and she was quite frankly unwilling to believe any of it. She had to remain on guard where her passions were concerned, because if she gave in to them, God help her, she'd be done for. "I don't want, or need, your flattery, Lord Martin." "Oh, but I believe you do. I also think you need to be kissed. Quite thoroughly kissed in fact." Her head drew back in shock. Remaining on guard against her passions was one thing, but resisting his advances was quite another. "I can assure you I need no such thing, and certainly not from a scoundrel like you." "A scoundrel like me. Indeed." He leaned closer and cradled her chin in his hand, and heaven help her, just the heat of his touch melted whatever resolve she had left. It kept her from retreating into that guarded fortress again- the place where she would only try to reject him before he had the chance to reject her. He leaned closer, still, and the instant their mouths met, she felt with shock the soft, hot texture of his tongue sliding into her mouth. Her breasts rose and fell with the quickening pace of her breathing, and unfamiliar shivers of delight coursed through her body. She had never been kissed like this. Ever. She closed her eyes and could do nothing but surrender to the burning heat of it. Was this real? she wondered in a love-struck haze she would surely chastise herself for later. Was Martin truly kissing her? And was she letting him? Yes, yes she was. She reached up to rest her hands on his broad shoulders while passion raced through her veins. She felt a throbbing sensation between her thighs from the chaos of vibrations in her body, and it sent her head spinning. Slowly he drew back, and she opened her eyes. He was regarding her closely. "Was that necessary?" she asked with breathless, lingering desire, knowing she wasn't fooling him for a second with that feeble attempt at hauteur. She'd just dissolved into warm putty in his hands, and he knew it. "I believe so." He leaned into her again, kissing her deeply a second time. She let out a whimper, a sound she'd never heard herself make before, and reached out to hold his face in her hands, to run her fingers through his beautiful thick hair. A symphony of little sighs poured out of her. Oh, she had definitely made the right decision to come sailing today, she thought with a rapturous smile. Think of what she was learning. It was all truly sublime. "You're delicious," he said, kissing down the side of her neck until she could barely breathe inside her tight bodice. His fingers played in the upswept hair at her nape. "You're beautiful, Evelyn. You must know it. Look at me. I want you like a schoolboy." He wrapped his hand around the back of her head and pressed his mouth firmly to hers again, and she met the kiss eagerly with lips parted, fists gripping his lapels. She could barely comprehend the ferocity of her desires.

What did you think the answer would be, Elisabeth? I toy with you because I can. Because it gives me great pleasure. Because I was bored." An inarticulate scream of rage strangled me. I wanted to destroy something, to spend my anger against the unfairness of everything. I wanted nothing more than to grapple with the Goblin King, to tear him limb to limb, a Maenad against Orpheus. I tightened my hands into fists. "Yes," he murmured. "Go ahead. Hit me. Strike me." The invitation was not just in his words, but his voice. He advanced. "Use your rage against me." We stared at each other, scarcely half a breath between us. This close, I could see that his gray eye was flecked with silver and blue, his green one ringed with amber and gold. Those eyes mocked me, inviting and inciting me into a passion. If I were a smoldering ember, he was the poker, stirring me into flames. I retreated. I was afraid. Afraid to touch him for fear of starting a fire within me. "What," I asked tightly, "do you want from me, mein Herr?" "I already told you what I want," he said. "You, entire." We did not relinquish each other's gaze. Let go, his eyes seemed to say. But I couldn't; if I surrendered to my fury, I wasn't certain what else I would give up. "Why?" My voice was hoarse. "Why what, Elisabeth?" "Why me?" My words were barely audible, but the Goblin King heard them. He had always heard me. "Why you?" Those sharp, pointed teeth glistened. "Who else but you?" Even his words were sharp, each slicing through me like a knife. "You, who have always been my playmate?

A great prayer for this besides “Jesus, I trust in you” is “O Jesus, I surrender this to you. You take care of it.”145

Yet another story, also spread by word of mouth, says that the immediate bloodline successor to the tlahtoani’s throne, Cuitlahuac, refused to obey the command to surrender and secretly ordered Mohtecutzoma’s assassination. As the tlahtoani, he then ordered the Mexihca and their allies to attack. There was only one battle, the Night of Sorrows, in which the conquistadores and their native allies were brutally defeated, and Hernán Cortez, leader of the Spanish army, was forced to retreat from Tenochtitlan, now known as Mexico City. It is said that he mourned the defeat under a tree. Nevertheless, Mohtecutzoma’s prophetic dream was destined to be fulfilled. The Spaniards were infected with smallpox, a disease that didn’t exist in Mexico at that time, and many of their corpses fell into the lagoon surrounding Tenochtitlan. The Aztec warriors washed their wounds in this water and were infected with the disease. Cuitlahuac was the first to die. Once all his men had followed him, the Aztecs were helpless — there were no more warriors who could save Mexico from its destiny. Tenochtitlan was left in the hands of a young tlahtoani, Cuauhtémoc, while the Spaniards and their allies regrouped and came back with a new army. After witnessing his predecessor’s dream come true, Cuauhtémoc spent this time not on defence but on hiding the treasure of Mexico. Ancient codices, together with a vast number of sacred stones, were buried at several sites, including Tula and Teotihuacan. Many of these treasures have not yet been found, but according to tradition some will come to light soon, and then the true story will be known.